Chubby Chaser
by toxic64
Summary: These are free chapters from my debut novel, Chubby Chaser. It is a young adult novel about Jason Pruitt, a high-school football star who tries to woo Sara Krason, the homely, overweight girl that no one at school likes. The novel will be released on 11/21/14 on Amazon.
1. Chapter 1

Sara Krason pushed the button to bring the target to her. Once it came, she pulled it from the hanger to examine her marksmanship: from behind her protective goggles, she was able to see that she managed to get all but one of her bullets inside the innermost ring. She put another target up and pressed the button to send it to the end of the forty-yard lane. She put another magazine into her Glock twenty-six, nine-millimeter pistol. She raised her gun and fired at the center ring of the target. (The earmuffs she wore protected her from hearing the ear-splitting sounds of her shots.) She brought the target to her and was pleased that she managed to get all her shots in the innermost ring this time.

That was enough for today. It was almost four, and she still had to stop by Harold's to get groceries for later on tonight. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with a hand towel.

On her way out, she stopped by her dad's office. Her father, Marvin, owned this and two other gun ranges in Pennsylvania, including one in Philadelphia. He had gotten Sara involved with shooting and hunting about three years ago, after her mother had died. It was the only time they spent together, besides the occasional dinner. Marvin was a good man, and he tried to be a good father, but he and Sara had never been close, though he did try to make more of an effort after Sara had lost her mother.

"Hey, kiddo, you heading out?" he asked from behind his large wooden desk, his meaty palms resting in his lap.

"Yeah. I'm stopping by the store on the way home. Do you want me to grab you anything while I'm there?"

"Uh, no. I'll have whatever you're making."

"Okay." As she walked out, Sara turned her head and accidently caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror embedded in one of the walls. Horrified, she turned away immediately. She hated practically everything about her appearance, from her double chin to her cottage-cheese thighs. And then there were the mounds of flab drooping from her arms like straw on a scarecrow and the rolls of fat encasing her stomach like a donut with filling. The only thing Sara liked about her appearance was her long dark-red hair. It was the only physical attribute she had received from her mother. (Why couldn't Sara look more like her? She had been as gorgeous as an oil painting before cancer had ravaged her.) She got her size and everything else from her dad.

Harold's was a supermarket chain that populated the northeast. They had pretty much everything lining their shelves: food, clothing, electronics . . . Sara wasn't sure, but it wouldn't surprise her if they carried the proverbial missing kitchen sink.

The store was extremely busy, even for a Saturday afternoon. Sara filled her cart with hard taco shells, ground beef, lettuce, shredded cheese, tomatoes, green onions, taco sauce, and sour cream. She was lucky enough to meet an empty lane when she was ready to check out her groceries. She rushed to put her stuff on the conveyor belt before anyone else came along.

"Hello. How are you doing today?" the cashier greeted her.

"I'm fine and—" Sara stopped speaking when she saw that her cashier was Andy Abbott, one of the assholes she went to school with. Her first thought was to put her stuff back into her cart and go to one of the other lanes—even though it would require her waiting awhile to check out her groceries—but she stopped herself, refusing to let this jerk scare her off. She flattened her voice and did her best to remain cool, calm, and collected. "I'm fine." She finished putting her food on the conveyor belt. While Andy was scanning her groceries, Sara demanded to have them double bagged.

"Sure thing." He looked as though he was sniggering at her. Sara would have called him on it, but she could feel beads of sweat forming on her forehead, partly from the heat and partly from nervousness, and she wanted to get the hell out of there before the beads started to drip far more than she wanted to confront Andy. She had a phobia about sweating in front of other people: from kindergarten until she had started high school, the kids she attended school with had taunted her for sweating through her clothes during the first couple of months of school—when the weather was still warm—and during the last couple of months—when the warm weather returned after winter hibernation—from doing absolutely nothing but sitting at a desk. A teacher had even gotten in on the _fun_ once, remarking a few weeks into the beginning of the school year, "You got sweat all over this!" in a disgusted tone, after a thirteen-year-old Sara had handed in a worksheet dappled with perspiration. The entire class had howled with laughter, and Sara—shoulders up, head down—had lumbered back to her seat. She now carried a hand towel and a change of clothes at all times during the spring, summer, and fall, but she didn't feel comfortable pulling her towel out at the moment: she didn't like sweating in front of other people, but she didn't like to wipe the sweat away in front of them, either; it only called more attention to her problem.

Andy handed her the last of her groceries before stating, "That'll be thirty-two dollars, even." Sara handed him two twenties, and he gave her back a five and three ones, along with her receipt. "Thank you, have a good day."

Sara walked away without replying. She heard chuckling once she had gotten a few steps away.

The ground beef sizzled in the frying pan as Sara moved it around with the spatula. She pushed and flipped the meat until it was dark brown. She scooped it into the four hard taco shells she had on her plate and sprinkled the toppings she had gotten from the store on it.

Moving from the kitchen and into the living room, Sara set her plate and drink (Mexican Coke) on the coffee table. She pressed play on the remote control to the blu-ray player. The first horror film up was _Scream_, Sara's favorite. It had been a tradition since sixth grade for her to watch horror films and pig out on Mexican food the weekend before school started. Her mom had done it with her when she was alive, because Sara didn't have any friends, and Sara had been doing it alone since then.

Her mom had passed three years ago on May twenty-first. Sara was about to graduate from junior high and would turn fourteen in a month. Her mother had been battling B-cell prolymphocytic leukemia for two years at that point, and she had suffered through chemotherapy and multiple trips to the hospital for drug administration before the illness finally took her. The morning of her mother's passing, Sara had awoken early to make her mom's favorite breakfast: blueberry pancakes with turkey sausage links and eggs over easy. Her dad, disheveled from the previous night's sleep and distraught from his recent discovery, came into the kitchen while she was whipping the pancake batter and told her that her mother was gone.

Sara didn't believe him at first; she couldn't afford to. If her mom had truly passed, who would go with her to the mall and make her feel pretty while she tried on hideous plus-size clothing? Who would look at her artwork and praise it? Who would she talk to, as in, _really talk to_? Who would she admire and look up to? Who would be her friend?

By the time of her mother's funeral, her mother's death still hadn't sunk in; Sara hadn't even cried yet. She thought something was wrong with her. How could she not shed a single tear for her mother? How could she not shed a single tear for her only friend? It wasn't until it came time to go back-to-school shopping that it hit her: She was trying on a pair of jeans in Lane Bryant, and she wanted to ask her mom whether they made her look like a hippo. But she couldn't. She couldn't because her mom was gone. She was gone and she was never coming back. Her tears had taken three months to come, and when they finally came, they came like a rushing flood, pelting down and visibly wetting the carpeted dressing-room floor.

Sara shook her head to clear her mind and focus on the movie. But the movie had already ended. And her plate was empty.


	2. Chapter 2

Sara pulled up to the school's student parking lot in her red Volkswagen Jetta with a grimace on her face: she had always bemoaned the return to school, because it meant another nine months of suffering the fools of the Tallis High student body. Fortunately, this was her last year, and if everything went according to plan, she would be attending Wesleyan University next fall, where she would finally be among her intellectual peers.

She came to school a little early that day to talk to her guidance counselor, Mrs. Townshend, about applying for early admission to Wesleyan. Reaching across her seat to the passenger side, Sara grabbed her backpack and then climbed out of her car, her bitch face firmly in place in case any of the jackasses who populated the school tried to mess with her, though they usually left her alone these days.

As she crossed the parking lot to get to the school, she turned and saw some dumb slut in a car giving a guy a blow job! In broad daylight! What the fuck! Sara turned away quickly, scrunching her face up in disgust. _One more year_, she told herself. Just one more year, and she would be free. Life would be much better after high school; "It gets better after high school" had to be a saying for a reason.

Mrs. Townshend was a sweet fifty-year-old woman, who kept a jar of bite-size candy bars on her desk (which Sara loved) and always smelled as though she bathed in perfume (which Sara didn't love). She looked over Sara's records on her computer before turning her attention to Sara. "Honestly, you're a shoo-in for Wesleyan even if you don't apply early admission. Your GPA is perfect, you're a lock for valedictorian, you scored a twenty-two hundred on your SATs, an eight hundred on your SAT math subject test, and a seven hundred on your SAT writing subject test. Then you've got your art portfolio, which goes to show you're well rounded and passionate about something. You still need two teacher recommendations though. How are you looking on those?"

"I'm on good terms with all my teachers, so I shouldn't have any trouble getting recommendations."

"Good. What about your essays? You can use your art for the one that requires you to write about one of your extracurricular activities or work experience, and you can write about anything you want for the other one."

"Um, I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it."

"What about your mother's passing? You can write about how that's affected you as a young girl going through puberty without her mother."

"No way."

"But—"

"No."

"Okay, well, try to come up with some other ideas. You have until November, so there's no big hurry. Your stats will be the most important part anyway."

The bell rang.

"That's the first bell. You better get to class."

"Okay." Sara grabbed her backpack (and a few candy bars) and left, wiping the sweat from her brow on the way out.

Mrs. Townshend was such a bitch. How could she even consider asking Sara to exploit her mother's death for a college essay? If Sara had to stoop that low for admission to Wesleyan, then she didn't want to go there. She did still need a topic for her second essay though. At first she thought about using her hunting and shooting experiences but then quickly decided against it; with all the school shootings that have occurred, that might make them averse to admitting her, and she didn't want to seem too weird or out there. _Ooh_,_ I know_! Sara thought as she finished her last candy bar. She tutored students at school to cover her National Honor Society community-service requirements. She could write about that and how it gave her so much joy to help her peers succeed academically. It was total bullshit, of course, but colleges ate stuff like that up.

Sara loved the order of her classes. It allowed her to get all of her least favorite subjects (AP English, French, and AP government) out of the way first and saved all of her favorites (physics, anatomy and physiology, and AP calculus) until after lunch. Sara didn't like English class because it usually involved reading some boring book or play, like Shakespeare's _The Taming of the Shrew_, simply because it was a classic. She loved to read but preferred to pick her own material. She didn't mind French that much, but it wasn't the language she wanted to study. She wanted to learn how to speak Japanese and Chinese, but her school didn't offer those. She had to take at least two years of a foreign language to graduate, and French was the best of a bad bunch (French, Spanish, and German). As for AP government, she simply found politics boring, but it was another class she had to take if she wanted to graduate. She could've taken regular government and regular English and regular calculus, but AP classes looked better to the college-admissions people. And because AP classes required at least a B-plus from last year's class, there were fewer dunderheads in the classroom, though a few riffraff always managed to sneak in, usually jocks and their female counterparts (cheerleaders).

When it was time for lunch, Sara went out to her car to eat. She had been avoiding the cafeteria since eighth grade. Kids had always made fun of her for how much she weighed, how much she ate, and the way that she ate, but that year they had done something particularly heinous to her.

Sara was sitting by herself in the cafeteria, eating a slice of pizza, periodically dipping it into a small container of ranch dressing, when Kimberly Weitsel came over and sat next to her. Kimberly was pretty and popular, and for the life of her, Sara couldn't figure out why Kimberly would want to sit next to her.

"Do you know who Lady Gaga is?" Kimberly asked.

"Y . . . yeah, I know who she is," Sara stuttered, nervous.

"Everyone keeps saying I look like her, but I don't know."

"You're a lot prettier than her."

"I am?"

Sara nodded enthusiastically.

"Thanks. You're really pretty too."

Sara shook her head and looked down. "N . . . n . . . no."

"No, really, you are. I just love your hair color. It's so different looking." She stroked a strand of Sara's dark-red locks. "Is this your natural hair color?"

Sara nodded.

"I'm totes jealous. All I have is lame, boring brown hair."

"B . . . b . . . but it's very nice brown hair. Very pert and shiny."

"Pert?" Kimberly clearly didn't know what the word meant.

"Y . . . y . . . yeah, pert, as in 'nice, attractive', you know?"

"You're so smart. Yet another thing about you to make me totes jealous."

Sara smiled. Kimberly was one of the prettiest and most popular girls in school, and here she was, saying she was envious of Sara. It was as though her birthday and Christmas had fallen on the same day. To Sara's surprise, Kimberly continued to have lunch with her for the next two weeks, and it was a great boon to her: she felt the anxiety and trepidation that had plagued her for years when it came time to go to school begin to dissipate; she felt more comfortable speaking up in public; and for the first time, she felt as though she had found a true friend.

That was all shot to hell when Kimberly brought a bag of homemade chocolate-chip cookies for lunch and gave two to Sara. Sara thought they tasted great. She didn't even notice a problem until near the end of the class she had after lunch. Her stomach cramped and became hot and bloated, as though it was filled to the brim with molten lava, and she could feel intense pressure in her anal region. She had diarrhea.

She trotted up to the desk of Mr. Whitman, her English teacher. "Mr. Whitman, may I use the restroom, please?"

He looked at the clock. "I can't give you permission to do that. There's only five minutes left until the end of class, and as you know, Ms. Krason, students aren't allowed out during the first or last five minutes of class."

"Please, Mr. Whitman, it's an emergency." She leaned toward him and whispered, "I have diarrhea."

"Oh, I've heard that one before, Ms. Krason," Mr. Whitman chuckled. "I never thought I'd hear it from you though."

Sara held her stomach and clenched her anal sphincter muscles; the heating and bloating were getting worse, as was the intense pounding in her anal region. The sound of laughter made her turn around. Kimberly and the people she was sitting with were looking at Sara with sly grins on their faces and tittering. Sara knew immediately what had happened. It was the cookies. Kimberly had pretended to be her friend to set her up with the cookies.

Sara had never disobeyed a teacher before, but she knew she wouldn't be able to hold it in until the end of class, and she didn't want to give her enemies the satisfaction of seeing her suffer anymore. So she ran for it, and several strides later, she involuntarily expelled the contents of her bowel, but she kept running. Behind her she could hear the entire class laughing.

That day was the last time Sara had eaten in public. It was also the last time she had ever tried to befriend anyone.


	3. Chapter 3

It had been two weeks since the start of school, and so far, everything had been going great for Jason: he had led the Tallis Eagles to victory during their first game of the season, he had obtained a homecoming-king nomination, and the weather had cooled down enough to allow him and the rest of the guys on the football team to wear their blue-and-white letterman jackets.

He still wasn't enjoying the school part of school though: all the teachers had such a bland way of teaching that it was next to impossible to pay attention to them. The last time he'd had a teacher that had fun with lessons was in eighth grade when he had taken Mrs. Weinstock's history class. It had been great. He had never had to open a book but had still managed to learn from all the awesome projects Mrs. Weinstock had had the students do and all the cool field trips she had taken her classes on. They didn't make teachers like that anymore.

Now, they made them like Mr. Henderson, his punctilious AP calculus teacher, who rigidly followed the book and whose class Jason, Eric, and Andy were in. They sat in the back, so they could talk and make fun of people.

"That bitch is such a know-it-all." Eric was talking about Sara Krason, a fat-ass blob of a girl sitting in the front of the class, answering most of Mr. Henderson's questions and correcting anybody who dared to answer incorrectly. She had a reputation for being a major bitch. Andy had told them she had acted like a vile cunt when she had come through his lane a couple of weeks ago at Harold's.

"Yeah, too bad she can't use all her smarts to figure out how to lose some weight," Jason joked. All three chuckled.

"Hey, fat girls need love too," opined Andy. "Besides, I've always wondered what it's like to fuck a chubby chick."

"Ew! Man, you're disgusting." Jason was playing, although he really did find fat girls repulsive. "But if you really wanna know what's it's like to bone a fat chick, why don't you go for it? Sara's right there for the taking. I mean, it's not like she's got any other guys beating down her door."

"Uh-uh." Andy shook his head. "There's no way that fat bitch is giving it up."

"I could get it," Jason boasted. He could never resist taking on a challenge or a bet.

"Bullshit," said Eric.

"I bet ya'll two hundred I could get it."

"Deal. You have until the end of the marking period. And you have to get her panties for proof or record it. I hope you record it. That way we can see this epic car crash for ourselves."

The three of them dapped on it.

The bell rang. Everyone began to clear out.

Jason saw Sara getting up to leave. He turned to his friends and smiled. "Watch and learn, bros." He chased Sara as she left, calling her name, but she didn't turn around. _She can_'_t be ignoring _me. He raced to get in front of her. He put on his player smile. "Hey, Sara, right?"

"Uh-huh," she said curtly while not even looking at him. He could see drops of sweat on her forehead. She tried to go around him, but he blocked her way.

"I'm Jason." He put his hand out to shake. She didn't take it.

"Did you want something?" she asked. She had an annoyed look on her pudgy face.

"I . . . I need your help with calculus. See, I'm only pulling a C, and I need to get it up to at least a B to keep my scholarship to SCU, and you're such a math whiz, and I know you tutor other kids, so I thought you could tutor me." He shrugged and smiled in an effortlessly adorable way that would've made most girls and sexually confused boys melt; Sara, however, remained ice cold.

"Okay. Meet me at 232 Pilstine Drive an hour after school—"

"I have football practice on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays until six."

Irritated, she sighed. "Okay, then meet me Tuesdays and Thursdays an hour after school. My tutoring sessions last an hour. Don't be late and be ready to work."

"Thank you." He nodded and smiled. "Can I have your phone number in case—"

"Jason, we go to school together, we have a class together, and in case you hadn't noticed, it's the one you need help with. If you need to tell me something, you can do it sometime during school." She walked away.

Jason stood there, taken aback: no girl had ever treated him that way—at least not before he had failed to return her calls or she had caught him _cheating_. This was going to be harder than he had thought, but he did love a challenge.


	4. Chapter 4

It was 9:38 p.m. Thirty-eight minutes past the start of the Halloween party. Sara had been ready to go by 8:25, but she had kept finding things to do. She had proofread her paper on _The Canterbury Tales _for her AP English class that was due next week Monday, even though she had done that twice before (once on Tuesday and again on Friday); she had gone over next week's lesson plans for the students she tutored, even though she usually did that on Sundays; and she had looked over her art portfolio for Wesleyan, even though she had done that this morning.

She'd been procrastinating, and she didn't procrastinate. Unlike most people, she got shit done as soon as possible. She procrastinated only when she was scared, and she was scared shitless of attending a party.

The last time she'd attended a party had been when she'd been twelve. It was her cousin Marie's thirteenth birthday party, and Sara was sure that the only reason she had gotten an invite was because her mom had strong-armed Lynn, Marie's mom, into letting Sara tag along with Marie and her friends. Her mom had probably used the fact that she and Lynn were sisters and had probably mentioned that she was worried about Sara having no friends to secure the invitation. Sara loved her mom and knew she had nothing but the best of intentions, but she hated when she did things like that.

The party took place at Hershey Park—an amusement park about an hour's drive away. The trip began on a sour note: in the car ride to the amusement park, Marie and the three friends she had with her acted as though Sara weren't in the car and talked among themselves, with every attempt Sara made to take part in the conversation spurned. Things went from bad to worse once they made it to Hershey Park: Lynn, a bony bird of a woman, kept asking the ride operators whether it was safe for a girl of Sara's size to get on the rides, inciting much snickering from the crowd, including from Marie and her friends.

At lunchtime Lynn ordered pepperoni-and-sausage pizzas and Pepsi for everyone else to eat and drink, and a salad, with a drop of vinegar dressing on the side, and a Diet Pepsi for Sara, and then she further pilloried her by saying, "My sister might let you get away with eating everything but the kitchen sink, but I won't. With me you're gonna eat nice and healthy." She grabbed Sara by the chin, tilting her face up. "You know, you really do have a pretty face. If you lost some weight, you could be a very beautiful young lady. Don't you know no boy will want you with the way you look now? And no man will want to make you his wife, either, if you still look this way when you get older. Didn't your mother ever teach you about that?"

Sara didn't respond; she was too deflated.

Lynn released her chin. "Eat your salad."

Sara heard Marie and her friends whispering and tittering on the other side of the table. They were probably glancing at her while they made fun of her, but Sara was too embarrassed to look up and see. Instead, she dropped her head down and tried to make herself as small as possible in her chair, as though that would protect her from the susurrant insults and murmurous laughing.

When she returned home, she lied and told her mother that she'd had a great time at the party, partly because she was too ashamed to reveal the truth and partly because she didn't want to cause trouble between her mom and her aunt Lynn, but when her mother had gotten her an invitation for the following year, she told her mom she had an upset stomach, so she wouldn't have to go.

And now Sara had received an invitation to another party—with people who were apt to be far crueler than her aunt, her cousin, and her cousin's friends had been—and she couldn't find the strength to leave her house. She contemplated calling Jason and telling him that something had come up and that she couldn't make it.

But she had promised Jason she would go. He was her friend—her only friend—and she didn't want to let him down or ruin the friendship. He had been extremely excited (and kind of desperate) for her to go. He had even called her to make sure she had gotten that asshole Eric's address.

But what if this was a trap? What if Jason wasn't really her friend? What if this was only an elaborate scheme to humiliate her, another laxative-cookie situation waiting to happen? Jason had been looking at her and laughing while she had been eating the other day (she shouldn't have eaten in front of him; that was so stupid of her).

_Stop it_,_ you_'_re being paranoid_! Jason had been nothing but nice to her since she had started tutoring him, and she had been nothing but a judgmental bitch to him for most of that time. Somebody like Jason wouldn't have the ability to plan such an elaborate scheme and see it through anyway: he didn't have the intelligence (his test scores had been such a joke that, before this week, he wouldn't even show them to her), the foresight, or the patience.

Jason had opened up to her—really opened up—about his deepest, darkest secrets. And there had been that one time where he had called her in despair over his future and had wanted to talk to her over all his other friends. Also, he had never mentioned her sweating.

The assholes she went to school with might lead her into a trap, but not Jason. Jason was a good guy. He was a good guy and he was her friend, and he was counting on her and expecting her to show up, and show up she would, but she would also be vigilant, so she would be prepared if any of the assholes there tried something.


End file.
